133 posts tagged with experiment.
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Land of Linkin'

LinkMe, November 2024: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just tag the resulting post "LinkMe" and include a nod back to the original suggestion. No self-linking and usual site rules apply, but otherwise feel free to post whatever you like! Eerie, creepy, and horror-themed links encouraged but not required. Look inside for a round-up from last month! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Nov 1, 2024 - 32 comments

Scare Up Some Links

LinkMe, đŸ‘» Spooky Season edition: 💀 Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just tag the resulting post "LinkMe" and include a nod back to the original suggestion. No self-linking and usual site rules apply, but otherwise feel free to post whatever you like! Eerie, creepy, and horror-themed links encouraged but not required. Look inside for a round-up from last month! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Oct 1, 2024 - 18 comments

he said it tasted strongly of copper

What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower?
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs on Sep 6, 2024 - 18 comments

Links like autumn leaves in a blue sky

LinkMe, September '24 edition: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just tag the resulting post "LinkMe" and include a nod back to the original suggestion. No self-linking and usual site rules apply, but otherwise feel free to post whatever you like! Look inside for previous round-ups plus some highlights from August. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Sep 1, 2024 - 20 comments

See Me, Feel Me, LinkMe

The third in an ongoing series of experiments for a different kind of MetaFilter experience: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just tag the resulting post "LinkMe" and include a nod back to the original suggestion. No self-linking and usual site rules apply, but otherwise feel free to post whatever you like! Look inside for a rundown of posts to come out of the last few threads. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 2, 2024 - 41 comments

Free market idea

Welcome to the Agora of Flancia!
posted by chavenet on Jul 26, 2024 - 6 comments

💡💡LinkMe: A MetaFilter experiment for posts💡💡

Hi, MetaFilter moderator here, posting an experimental thread, based on a recent suggestion by Rhaomi. Here's the idea, paraphrasing:

"Find a neat article, video, blog, etc. but don't feel up to the work of cobbling together an FPP, tags, title, and otherwise putting yourself out there? Just comment "LinkMe:" followed by the link and maybe a one sentence description for context. Everybody has tacit permission to turn your link into an FPP if they'd like, first come first serve, with a nod back to the original LinkFilter comment"

An example of the type of comment to make is inside, but don't feel bound to that exact format! [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Jun 8, 2024 - 108 comments

Food experiments from 1994 & 1998

Some gems of the Old Web (note, posts do not link to video):
June 1994: And, if you take a grape, cut it in half but leave the sides attached by a piece of skin, and then microwave it. Sparks!
August 1994: If you leave a pop-tart in a toaster too long, the results are... incendiary.
And from 1998: Marshmallow Peep research [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Nov 27, 2022 - 25 comments

Goldfish learned how to drive during about a dozen 30-minute lessons.

In a new experiment, six goldfish learned to drive a tank of water on wheels around a room. This feat of steering suggests that fishes’ navigational abilities hold up even on land. Illustrated by cartoonist JoAnna Wendel as part of the Wild Things series for Science News Explores.
posted by spamandkimchi on Nov 14, 2022 - 21 comments

Effect of Humming on Vision

The bait (or assignment). [more inside]
posted by aniola on Aug 4, 2022 - 14 comments

What’s cooler than being cool?

Controversy continues over whether hot water freezes faster than cold water, decades after teenage Erasto Mpemba initiated the first systematic, scientific studies. In the effort to confirm or refute the ‘Mpemba effect’ physicists are developing new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium.
posted by theory on Jul 7, 2022 - 27 comments

Survivor of "Elan School"'s Harrowing Tale

elan.school is a harrowing webcomic now in 61 installments (the latest posted August 27) by a survivor of the "Elan School", a reform school in the woods of Poland Springs, Maine. The school, which operated from 1970 to 2011 when it was shut down, used cult methods, forcing kids to scream insults at each other hours a day, remain expressionless while being insulted, box each other in a ring, and confine others to sit in the corner. Communication with family was closely supervised to keep the abuse hidden. The webcomic may have started in late 2018 to judge from author "Joe Nobody"'s Patreon, but has been garnering attention on Reddit
posted by Schmucko on Sep 4, 2021 - 70 comments

Information Engines

World's fastest information-fueled engine designed by university researchers - "The development of this engine, which converts the random jiggling of a microscopic particle into stored energy, is [informing] researchers' understanding of how to rapidly and efficiently convert information into 'work.'" [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jun 25, 2021 - 11 comments

Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life [ungated link] - "Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism." (NYT, PBS) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on May 4, 2021 - 22 comments

Long time till spring

A seedbank-testing experiment that started in 1879 has decades to run. It's a simple experiment, but the simple things are hard: neither losing the seeds nor digging them up too early. From the point of view of the *seeds* the simple thing -- don't germinate until you can grow -- is also getting pretty hard. [more inside]
posted by clew on Apr 27, 2021 - 8 comments

Irene Pepperberg -- Alex and Me

Irene Pepperberg -- Alex and Me [more inside]
posted by y2karl on Jan 17, 2021 - 8 comments

lower the stakes

Spend More on Society and Get More for Yourself - "The coronavirus crisis demonstrates a basic truth. American individualism has made individuals unhappy and, too frequently, sick. There is another way, an economist says." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jul 24, 2020 - 19 comments

if you say ‘patients’ when you mean ‘genetically modified mice’

Just Says In Mice retweets headlines touting new studies with the important and oft-omitted modifier "IN MICE".
The explanation: "Reporting preliminary animal research out of context. Often the easiest way to fix it is appending a simple suffix: IN MICE."
An example: Neurobiologists Discover an “On/Off” Switch for Pain IN MICE
posted by spamandkimchi on Jun 23, 2020 - 17 comments

Singular science

“N of 1” studies aim to answer medical questions one person at a time. "As with most research studies, N of 1 studies gain their power through data points. But instead of taking a few measurements from many people, researchers can conduct many measurements from one person over time." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi on Mar 13, 2020 - 7 comments

why do you build me up

The Brick Experiment Channel does wordless, lightly-annotated build experiments with lego bricks and gears and motors. How fast a wheel? How heavy a weight? What if you built a submarine inside a plastic pitcher? [more inside]
posted by cortex on Aug 7, 2019 - 4 comments

A social experiment without consent, oversight or regulation

Alphabet-Owned Jigsaw Bought a Russian Troll Campaign as an Experiment.
posted by adept256 on Jun 12, 2019 - 35 comments

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it. They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition. The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted. That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality.
posted by GoblinHoney on Mar 13, 2019 - 63 comments

Finnish Basic Income experiment: positive psychological effects

Finland's two-year experiment with Basic Income have concluded, and the preliminary results are out (Kela.fi x2). The take-aways are generally mixed to pessimistic, many similar to this Fortune article title: Finland's Basic Income Experiment Kind of Works, but Not in Employment Terms. In short, while the €560 (~$630) per person per month, given to 2,000 people, wasn't enough to boost employment, those BI recipients were happier and less stressed, a result that was apparent after only four months (Business Insider). While Finland chose to end the experiment here, as the Government rejects request to expand scheme and plans stricter benefits rules (Guardian), others are trying their own Basic Income experiments (Huffington Post). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Feb 11, 2019 - 53 comments

When eating McDonald’s fries, do not dilly-dally

First, speed is key here. Second, if you have the ability to wait for a fresh batch, do. Third, preserve heat at all costs. You have this many minutes to consume McDonald's French fries before they're inedible.
posted by Vesihiisi on Feb 5, 2019 - 93 comments

How experimental psychology can help us understand art

Whys of seeing. "Experimental psychology is providing concrete answers to some of the great philosophical debates about art and its meaning." [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Jan 15, 2019 - 13 comments

the replication revolution

The competing narratives of scientific revolution - "Scientific revolutions occur on all scales, but here let's talk about some of the biggies: [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Aug 22, 2018 - 20 comments

People use basic income to improve their quality of life

Universal basic income hasn't made me rich. But my life is more enriching: "The Finnish basic income trial, of which I am part, finishes at the end of the year. Having been interviewed by nearly 70 separate media outlets, from the BBC to Le Figaro, the question I have been asked most often has been: how has the basic income trial changed my life? My answer is simple. In money terms, my life has not changed at all. However, the psychological effects of this human experiment have been transformative. I vastly prefer basic income to a benefits system fraught with complicated forms, mandatory courses and pointless obligations... it gives you security to chase other opportunities. It pushes you to seek fulfilling work – and isn't that what unemployment benefits should do?" [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Aug 10, 2018 - 36 comments

“Hot Dog Water is the NEW coconut water!”

Someone Sold Hot Dog Water for $28 at a Festival [Teen Vogue] — literal bottles of water containing a single hot dog each — which were sold at the Car Free Day festival in Vancouver. [more inside]
posted by Fizz on Jun 24, 2018 - 56 comments

Music Alters Mood Alters Visual Perception

Music Alters Visual Perception "As illusory percepts are believed to reflect the content of internal representations that are employed by the brain during top-down processing of visual input, we conclude that top-down modulation of visual processing is not purely predictive in nature: mood, in this case manipulated by music, may also directly alter the way we perceive the world."
posted by OmieWise on May 4, 2018 - 13 comments

Should Leftists Support UBI?

“The rogue’s gallery of right-wing supporters, from Milton Friedman to Charles Murray, is often unambiguous in its desire to use basic income as a knife to eviscerate the expensive insides of the welfare state. To different degrees, recent support within elite tech-chauvinist circles, from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg, might be similarly understood. How on earth could Marxists form a political alliance with the boy-king of Silicon Valley? Perhaps some elites see basic income as a pragmatic means to avoid the radicalization of a population that has seen little improvement in living standards in recent years, but others envision a Trojan horse designed to raid the citadels of Social Security, Medicare, and education spending.“ Debating Universal Basic Income - David Calnitsky (Catalyst)
posted by The Whelk on Mar 1, 2018 - 57 comments

CAN YOU TELL IF TWO CHIMPANZEES ARE RELATED BY LOOKING AT THEIR PHOTOS?

Well, can you, punk?

The Great Ape Dictionary needs your help! In our experiment, hosted by Gorilla.sc, you will see a photo of a chimpanzee and four possible matches. Can you tell who is related to who? Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters – they’re all there! Humans can recognise biological relatives through facial features; we want to explore how kin-based facial recognition evolved in humans and other primates.

CLICK HERE TO START THE EXPERIMENT
posted by Johnny Wallflower on Jan 11, 2018 - 97 comments

Pointy Water

The Icicle Atlas contains more than 230,000 images of icicles (plus 3D models, time lapse movies and time-series data) on 237 icicles made at the University of Toronto over a five year period. [Via Ottawa Citizen] The atlas is the end product of a quest to determine why icicles form ripples.
posted by Mitheral on Nov 22, 2017 - 8 comments

Because we don’t know what soup is, and neither do you!

SOMETHING SOMETHING SOUP SOMETHING could be defined as a videogame. We prefer to think of it as an interactive thought experiment: a piece of technology that discloses situations and presents notions in ways that are interactive and negotiable (and maybe even playful).
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Oct 26, 2017 - 24 comments

“If you went in the room when it was switched on, you’d burn directly,”

German scientists are switching on “the world’s largest artificial sun” in the hope that intense light sources can be used to generate climate-friendly fuel. [The Guardian] “The Synlight experiment in Jülich, about 19 miles west of Cologne, consists 149 souped-up film projector spotlights and produces light about 10,000 times the intensity of natural sunlight on Earth. When all the lamps are swivelled to concentrate light on a single spot, the instrument can generate temperatures of around 3,500C – around two to three times the temperature of a blast furnace.”
posted by Fizz on Mar 23, 2017 - 36 comments

The Black Blood of the Earth

At some point, all of us start wondering how much coffee we can drink before our hearts explode. This typically happens when we are up, very late, in college with either the panic of a final the next day or have nothing particularly better to do than try to achieve acute caffeine poisoning... Thus was born Black Blood of the Earth
posted by Karmakaze on Mar 15, 2017 - 52 comments

The Big Bell Test needs your help

Some scientists are hoping that you can help them prove Einstein wrong by choosing 1 or 0s!
posted by of strange foe on Nov 29, 2016 - 53 comments

Testing Nexus on 'NIMH' mice

Nanowire Mesh Monitors Mouse Brains - "Injectable 'neural lace'* brain-computer interface works in mice for months at a time." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Aug 30, 2016 - 31 comments

Sad Face

Can smiling make you happier? Maybe not. We have no idea. ... The basic finding of Strack’s research—that a facial expression can change your feelings even if you don’t know that you’re making it—has now been reproduced, at least conceptually, many, many times. ... In recent years, it has even formed the basis for the treatment of mental illness. An idea that Strack himself had scoffed at in the 1980s now is taken very seriously: Several recent, randomized clinical trials found that injecting patients’ faces with Botox to make their “frown lines” go away also helped them to recover from depression. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna on Aug 29, 2016 - 19 comments

In the grim darkness of the fur future, there is only war

"On the shores of Payette Lake are crates full of beavers, part of a shipment to be dropped in the primitive area by parachute from an airplane." A clip from Fur for the Future, a recently rediscovered documentary from 1948 about Idaho Fish and Game parachuting beavers into the state's backcountry.
posted by oulipian on Oct 23, 2015 - 28 comments

The Final Experiment Is Nigh

Adam and Jamie announce the end of their classic Mythbusters series in this week's Entertainment Tonight. [more inside]
posted by fairmettle on Oct 21, 2015 - 94 comments

6 Tricks to Get 86% More Chipotle Burrito (for free!)

A man ate 35 Chipotle burritos in one week to help determine how to maximize the amount of food one can get in a single Chipotle order.
posted by reenum on Aug 13, 2015 - 104 comments

Ooh ooh a special route master!

Exhausting a Crowd is an interactive video you can annotate yourself, using footage from a London street. It was commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum as part of their All of This Belongs to You exhibition.
posted by like_neon on Jul 10, 2015 - 13 comments

Windmill Not Included

Tilting the Streets of San Francisco (Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq on Jun 11, 2015 - 19 comments

Have a Guinness (Latte) when you're tired

Starbucks Is Testing a Drink That Tastes Like Guinness (Without the Alcohol) by Samantha Grossman (@sam_grossman), Time magazine:
The new drink, called the Dark Barrel Latte, is being tested at select locations across Ohio and Florida, Grubstreet reports. It doesn't contain any alcohol, but it supposedly contains the dark, toasty, malty flavors of Guinness. A BuzzFeed writer who got his hands on one in Columbus confirmed that it really does taste like stout. Several customers who've tweeted about the drink agree that it tastes like Guinness — but the jury's still out on whether or not that’s actually a good thing.

When I asked a colleague who was born and raised in Dublin (Guinness's birthplace) how he felt about all this, he responded first with this GIF. Then, as he mulled it over a bit more, he added, "Holy hell. Worst." Then he posed a question: "American Guinness already doesn't taste like Guinness. So what will this taste like?" Then he barfed all over me and my stupid American ignorance.
[more inside] posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome on Sep 23, 2014 - 165 comments

Fifth Use of a Physics Degree: Proceed to Nerd Out

Amusing Surface Tension Experiment (SLYT) Mad science with a ball point pen, cup of water and a bit of liquid soap. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California on Aug 17, 2014 - 25 comments

We all really are just rats in the Facebook maze

Facebook scientists, having apparently become bored with optimizing advertising algorithms, are now running social science experiments on the users. Link to the actual paper. I assume they are already selling this to the advertisers as a way to alter "brand perceptions."
posted by COD on Jun 28, 2014 - 354 comments

The search for psychology's lost boy

"He pictured sitting down with Albert—who would have been in his 80s when Beck started searching for him—and watching the Little Albert video together." [more inside]
posted by Catseye on Jun 2, 2014 - 4 comments

"Ethically Impossible" STD Research in Guatemala

Kayte Spector-Bagdady gives a lecture at the Rock Ethics Institute summarizing a report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues on the 1946-1948 U.S.-Guatemala STD Experiments. [Previously] [Previouslier]
posted by Jonathan Livengood on May 11, 2014 - 9 comments

Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research

Jeffrey Mogil’s students suspected there was something fishy going on with their experiments. They were injecting an irritant into the feet of mice to test their pain response, but the rodents didn’t seem to feel anything. “We thought there was something wrong with the injection,” says Mogil, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The real culprit was far more surprising: The mice that didn’t feel pain had been handled by male students. Mogil’s group discovered that this gender distinction alone was enough to throw off their whole experiment—and likely influences the work of other researchers as well. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb on Apr 29, 2014 - 79 comments

I walked in at the best time.

Two pounds of dry ice in the kitchen sink.
posted by griphus on Jan 18, 2014 - 68 comments

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